“with my mind stayed on freedom, hallelu, hallelu”

If you’d driven past Central Alabama Women’s Clinic today around 11:00 AM, you would have seen a small group of people gathered on the corner near the building. A couple of news cameras would have been pointed at a man in clerics and a tall, black woman in a gray sweater dress.

You might have thought, “Hmm. Wonder what’s going on there? Maybe something happened at the hospital.” If you’re very, very keen on your pro-life news, you might have even thought, “Ah, there’s that group of pro-lifers who believe Dr. Lett is running an illegal abortion clinic. They have a press conference today.”

I’m willing to admit that the latter is far less likely. Maybe even unrealistic. Either way, unless you stopped your car and joined in with the group, listening intently to the prayers offered after all the questions from the press had ceased. And unless you believed, as I do, that prayer outside of an abortion clinic throws open heaven’s gate – you may not have recognized the significance of this event.

You see, for however many years, the doctor in Central Alabama Women’s Center has been taking the lives of preborn children for about $550 a shot. That’s the starting rate for “the place you go” when you need an abortion in Selma.

No one talks about it publicly. Dr. Lett, the man who owns the clinic, does not refer to himself as an “abortionist.” But give his office just one call about the procedure and you’ll hear a woman on the other end say, “Ok, here’s how it works…”

That’s how babies are aborted in Selma, Alabama. In secret, lonely silence. That is, until today, when a group of people who believe those children deserve better than Dr. Lett’s killing stood – for the very first time – on a patch of grass downhill from his front door, and acknowledged the lives lost in that clinic; we acknowledged the women harmed by Lett’s unregulated abortions; and we prayed for each of them.

That is the truest beginning of the work to come.

Yes, we will continue to hold press conferences and build awareness about Lett’s illegal clinic, just as we will continue to unrelentingly call for the Alabama Department of Public Health to (just once) do its actual job. Those are vital components to this specific campaign, and I have no doubt that we will be successful, just as we have been in the past. But before we could start these new efforts, we had to start here, today, with prayer on a grassy median and the acknowledgement that every human life deserves dignity, and every human life matters – especially when that life has been taken in brutal violence.

Oswald Chambers said, “Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work.” I pray, ardently, that Dr. Lett realizes the true value of the women and children he so flippantly destroys, and that God’s justice and righteousness will reign in the city of Selma, Alabama – as it should.

We all know that Selma has deep roots in this nation’s fight for civil rights, the fight for an equal chance at living for every man and woman. Why should children in the womb be denied that chance by a man with no regard for the law? Why should women in Selma be subjected to a doctor who doesn’t adhere to regulations?

They shouldn’t. Both mother and child have a right to be protected. And today, for the first time since Dr. Lett opened his doors on the Selma community, we brought this injustice to light and petitioned God to address it.

All we need do now is keep up with the steps He sets before us.

“Commit your way to the Lord;trust in Him, and He will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light,and your justice as the noonday.” -Psalm 37:5 & 6